The invention relates to a method for processing and transmitting, as well as for receiving and processing data. The invention also relates to a transmitter and receiver for implementing the method.
In communication systems, messages are transmitted between the transmitter and receiver. A special example of communication systems are radio communication systems. Messages, for instance containing speech information, image information, video information, SMS (Short Message Service), MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) or other data, are transmitted here between the transmitter and receiver via a radio interface with the aid of electromagnetic waves. Radio stations can in this case be different types of subscriber-side radio stations, repeaters or network-side radio facilities such as base stations or radio access points, depending on the concrete configuration of the radio communication system. In a mobile radio communication system, at least one part of the subscriber-side radio stations are mobile radio stations. The electromagnetic waves are emitted at carrier frequencies which lie in the frequency band provided for the respective system.
Mobile radio communication systems are often designed as cellular systems, e.g. according to the GSM standard, (Global System for Mobile Communication) or UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) with a network infrastructure including base stations, facilities for monitoring and controlling the base stations and further network-side facilities for instance. Aside from these wide-spread organized (supralocal) cellular, hierarchical radio networks, wireless local networks (WLANs, Wireless Local Area Networks) with a generally spatially significantly more limited radio coverage area also exist.
Examples of information which is transmitted in communication systems are images or videos, with the latter being a sequence of images. By virtue of the high data rates required for the transmission of image or video data, suitable encoding methods are used particularly in radio communication systems for image or video data. The use of scalable information is particularly suited to this, with the basic information being transmitted during the transmission of scalable information and additionally the information supplementing the basic information. Scalable data thus has the characteristic of being able to be present at the receiver with a reduced quality, by the receiver only decoding the basic information or the basic information and a part of the supplementary information and not the basic information and all supplementary information. The scalability of the image or video data can relate to a plurality of scaling dimensions, thus to the local resolution of individual images for instance.